Sections 2 through 4 of Chapter 1 contain historical material. Naur's HOPL paper quotes section 2 and the first two sections of section 3 to provide coverage of the events of which he lacked firsthand experience.

"After IFIP WG2.1 had been formed (initially from the original authors of ALGOL 60) a decision was taken in March 1964 to revive the ALGOL Bulletin, which had lain dormant since the publication of the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60 in 1962. Fraser Duncan was appointed as Editor, and AB16 duly appeared in May 1964. As present editor of the AB, I have no access to any issues prior to AB16, but I have managed to piece together a complete set since that date, and they form a fascinating account of what was going on in those years. The following article surveys some of the material published between 1964 and 1972."

F. L. Bauer. The Cellar Principle of State Transition and Storage Allocation. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 12, Number 1 (January-March 1990), pages 41-49. IEEE Computer Society

Gerard Alberts, editor. Conference on the history of ALGOL 68. Historical Note AM-HN9301, Department of Analysis, Algebra, and Geometry, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, January 1993. Conference on 25 years of ALGOL 68 held on the occasion of the 47th anniversary of CWI, Amsterdam, February 11, 1993. Online at cwi.nl

John Peck. Aad van Wijngaarden and the Mathematisch Centrum, A Personal Recollection.

Nicholas Enticknap and Pat Woodroffe. The early days of Algol. Computer RESURRECTION : The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1992 Online at cs.man.ac.uk

Summarizes a meeting at the Science Museum recognizing the 30th anniversary of the first ALGOL 60 implementations, with presentations by Mike Woodger and David Hill on Algol standardization, followed by talks by Lawford Russell on Whetstone ALGOL for the English Electric KDF9, Jeff Hillmore on Elliot 803 ALGOL, and Richard de Morgan on DECsystem-10 ALGOL.

"In the 1950s, there was a good deal of discussion at computer conferences about what was then known as automatic programming. This led to Fortran, which was developed by a group within IBM who had strictly pragmatic aims. They saw a clear need for some system that would enable the labor of programming to be reduced. The scientific study of programming languages began slightly later with the publication of the Algol 60 report. This was put together by an international committee whose aims were essentially intellectual. They set out to design a language that was elegant in a mathematical sense and would enable scientists to specify a computation without concerning themselves about practical details. Together, Fortran and Algol define a fault line that runs through the study of programming languages that we are now only beginning to bridge."

"Abstract: In this oral history Edsger Dijkstra recounts his early education and training as a theoretical physicist and as a 'programmer'. Dijkstra describes his work developing software, and his activities at several early information processing conferences. Dijkstra also discourses on the development of ALGOL 60 and the origins of computing science in Europe and America."

H. T. de Beer. The History of the ALGOL Effort. Master's Thesis in Computer Science and Engineering (Technische Informatica) at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, August 2006. Online at heerdebeer.org

"Software for Europe proposes as a working hypothesis that, beyond the effort to define a new language, the culture of software co-entrepreneurship across borders represented by ALGOL helped to create a specifically European space for software."

Sten Henriksson. A brief history of the stack. 2009 Worksop, Special Interest Group, Computers, Information and Society, Society for the History of Technology. PDF at sigcis.org

David Nofre. Unravelling Algol: US, Europe and the creation of a programming language, 1955-1960. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 32, Number 2 (April-June 2010), pages 58-68. Online at Computing ThenIEEE Computer Society

"I argue,
however, that the transatlantic collaboration
that would lead to the making of Algol was born from a shared concern within American
and European computing centers: the need
to foster information exchange between
computing centers."

Chapter 9 is "The Algol Research Programme". The book is an extended version of Priestley's PhD thesis: Logic and the Development of Programming Languages, 1930-1975. University College London, May 2008.